Mapping the Stars

<div>Often dismissed as trivial or even trash celebrity culture offers a unique way of considering what it means to be human. In <i>Mapping the Stars</i> Claire Sisco King shows how close analysis of the complex and sometimes contradictory forms of celebrity culture can challenge dominant ideas about selfhood. In particular as a formation that develops across time mediums and texts celebrity is useful for demonstrating how humanness is defined by relationality contingency and even vulnerability. King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell Will Smith and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images these figures nonetheless share a consistent if not conspicuous interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters magazines cinema and social media-and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)-King argues that these stars' self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.</div>